Hi. I just found about this thread from Behdad and Hamed: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-April/thread.html#00080
(Sorry, I have recently moved to California from Iran, and have not been able to buy a laptop yet, and am really not able to use my new employer's computers for GNOME work, which includes reading my @farsiweb.info email. That will get solved shortly, when I get a personal laptop. If anybody is interested in a quicker response from me regarding Persian translations or any of my other GNOME work, please either file a bug in the bugzilla or email me at my [EMAIL PROTECTED] address for a while, until I get in shape.) To cut the long story short, I and the other members of the "volunteer" Persian translation team are interested to work with new volunteers, if they want to work with us. Believe me, this is a quite tiring work, translating hundreds of messages, finding i18n bugs, pursuing them through numerous release cycles, etc. Who can't use more hands? I don't think two teams for one language makes any sense. There was also some accusations. My short answers: * Sharif Linux is not completely free: That's true. Sharif Linux includes a few things like Adobe Flash, so it's not completely free software. But that is totally unrelated to its GNOME parts. The source code CDs for Sharif Linux which are sent to anybody who has the binaries for gratis contain all GNOME applications and their translations in source form, under the original upstream license. Ubuntu can take all those translations and use them, if they respect the GPL/LGPL license. * FarsiWeb hasn't upstreamed its translations: That's NOT true. Sharif Linux 2 shipped GNOME 2.10. GNOME 2.12 and GNOME 2.14, the releases after that, was the first GNOME releases that fully supported Persian (more than 80% translated). FarsiWeb worked with the Persian team to upstream all they could (they were not required to, they were only required to provide the source code to people who had the binaries), and that resulted in the first fully supported Persian localized version of GNOME. BUT, there was not much Persian translation work by volunteers after that, which is the reason Persian has again fallen back to partially supported. I believe that if the Persian speaking user community needs better Persian support in what they are using now (vs the next release of Sharif Linux), they should learn localization and Persian translation and then contribute. * Sharif Linux has much better Persian support than Ubuntu: That's absolutely true. FarsiWeb's technical team works very hard on Sharif Linux, and has the help of people like Behdad Esfahbod (a former FarsiWeb employee who has contributed huge amounts of time and great code to GNOME and other free software projects). If Ubuntu wants to catch on with the Persian support, the interested parties (Persian-speaking volunteers?) need to put a few more thousands of hours in it. Before I forget, I would like to ask everyone NOT TO apply new Persian translations or patches to the SVN without a review by another more experienced translator, please! GNOME doesn't do that for code, and it shouldn't do it for translations either. Back to my day job, Roozbeh _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
